Men’s Spirituality

Stephen Ashton

Those of you who’ve read ‘Why men don’t listen and women can’t read maps’ or similar – will be aware that men’s ‘brain wiring’ is significantly different to women’s. Can this reflect on the ‘spiritual journey’ [for want of a better phrase], for men and women too? Have you ever wondered, for example, why our churches are two-thirds filled by women, and our prisons, 98% by men?

In this session we’ll try to offer some experience of what ‘male spirituality’ is, and how it offers the possibility for roughly half the population to… well, stop being over-age teenagers…

Stephen Ashton undertook Richard Rohr’s Men’s Rites of Passage in 2004 and has been involved with men’s spirituality work ever since: in the men’s groups that meet at Llansôr Mill, in the local prison, and with Circles of Support and Accountability, an organisation that enables men who have committed sexually-based offences in the past to live safely in the community.